Notes · The market · July 23, 2026

Why European brands struggle to crack the US, and what it actually takes.

I've spent twenty years launching brands into new markets on both sides of the Atlantic. American brands into Europe: Tupperware, Cuisinart, a few others. European and British brands the other way, into the US. So I've run this crossing from the inside, in both directions, and when a European brand stalls in America, it stalls the same way every time.

A European brand does well at home. Strong product, loyal customers, healthy margins. The founder looks at the US and sees a market five times the size with the same language and assumes it is the same game, just bigger. They ship the same site, the same ads, the same price, and they wait.

Then the numbers don't come. And here is the part that catches everyone: it is rarely the product. The product is usually fine. Sometimes it is better than what Americans already buy.

The US isn't a bigger version of your home market. It's a different market that happens to share your language.

Start with what a customer costs.

In most of Europe you can still buy attention at a sensible price. In the US you are bidding against brands with enormous budgets and years of pixel data, in the most expensive ad auction there is. The click that's cheap at home costs several times that here, and the customer is harder to convince because they already have four brands doing roughly what you do. If your math only worked on cheap traffic, it breaks on landing.

Then trust.

A European founder builds credibility the way it is built at home: quietly, over time, let the product speak. That reads as absent in the US. American shoppers want the proof loud and up front. Reviews, press, founder story, guarantee, the whole apparatus. Not because they are shallow, but because they are drowning in choice and using every shortcut they can to decide who is real. A brand that whispers gets skipped.

Then the plumbing nobody puts in the deck.

Duties and customs. State sales tax, which is not one tax but a different rule in every state. Shipping times that make or break the cart. A returns policy that meets American expectations, which are higher than you think. Payment methods people actually use. Support in the right time zone. None of it is glamorous. All of it quietly kills conversion when it is wrong, and the founder back home never sees why, because the dashboard just shows a number that won't move.

So what actually takes a brand across?

Not a translation. The site is already in English. Not a bigger ad budget aimed at the same plan, which just loses money faster. What it takes is someone who has run the American market from the inside and can tell you, before you spend, whether the numbers even work. What a customer really costs to win here. What they are worth over time once you have them. Whether the model that prints money at home can survive US acquisition costs, or whether it needs to be rebuilt for this market first.

That last question is the one most brands skip, and it is the one that decides the whole thing. Sometimes the honest answer is that the US play works beautifully. Sometimes it is that you need a higher price, a different offer, or a subscription to carry the acquisition cost, and better to know that on a spreadsheet than after two burned quarters.

Treat America as its own build.

The brands that make it treat America as its own build. New assumptions, tested, not imported. They get the unglamorous plumbing right before they scale the spend. And they find someone who lives in the market and has made the crossing both ways, so the local instinct is bought, not guessed.

The gap between a great European brand and a great American one is smaller than it looks. It is just made of a hundred small things that are invisible from three thousand miles away, and obvious from here.

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